Брайан Макклеллан - Wrath of Empire

“Kill her,” Dvory hissed.

Ji-Orz pursed his lips. There was no fear in his eyes as he looked across the carnage, but there was something else. His eyes met Styke’s, and he gave a long-suffering sigh and let go of Lindet’s neck. “No.”

“What?” Dvory demanded.

“Your hold on me has broken. You are weak, Great Ka. You are spread too thin, and I am no longer compelled.” Ji-Orz drew the bone knife from his belt, then a bone knife from beneath his jacket, and lay them both on the ground. “I’m tired,” he said. “I’m tired of this. I’m tired of you. I’ve watched Ben Styke kill three dragonmen. In all my life, I have never and will never see such a thing again. I may fight him someday, but I refuse to slaughter an artist like this when he is barely able to fight.”

Dvory straightened, his trembling intensifying. “You’re scared of him?”

“I am a dragonman. We do not feel fear.” Ji-Orz looked sidelong at Lindet. “But I respect strength.”

“I will find you, and I will break you,” Dvory said in a low, angry voice.

Ji-Orz inclined his head slightly. “I’ll see you again, Ben Styke.” Without another word, he was gone through the side door, out the back of the great hall.

Styke turned his gaze on Dvory, watching the struggle play out across Dvory’s face in much the same way as it played out across that cuirassier commander Ka-poel enthralled last week. He could see the fight in Dvory’s eyes and the sweat on his brow. He squeezed his eyes shut, then wiped the perspiration from his cheeks with the back of his sleeve. He gave a mighty shiver before looking down at Styke with someone else’s eyes.

“You’ll bleed out soon enough, Styke. No one survives those wounds.”

Styke still rested on one knee, his head feeling heavy and his eyes tired. The dragonman’s exit seemed to take the strength from his limbs, and he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep. He touched the bloody stone with one hand and tried to gather his wits before shakily pushing himself back up to his feet. He lifted his knife.

Dvory swallowed, looking from Styke to Ka-poel. His face took on an almost paternalistic expression. “Child,” he said. “I’ve been calling for you. Why don’t you answer? Kill them for me, and then join me in Landfall. You’ve locked the godstone, but I will unravel it sooner or later. With your help I can end this war quickly. We can put a stop to this bloodshed and unite the continents once more.”

Ka-poel gestured emphatically.

“I don’t know what that means. Why do you not speak? Are you mute?”

Styke lurched forward, grabbing Dvory by the arm as he began to draw his sword. He pressed the tip of his knife to Dvory’s throat. “She called you a prick.”

Dvory’s lips drew back in a snarl, and suddenly Styke felt himself pushed aside. He staggered away as Ka-poel took his place in front of Dvory. She leaned toward him, searching his eyes as if looking through a looking glass at something far away.

“My child,” Dvory whispered.

Ka-poel lifted her long needle and gently drew the tip down Dvory’s cheek, gathering drops of blood as it went. She held it up to the light, and Dvory shifted nervously in front of her. She smiled at the man she saw behind Dvory’s countenance, and thrust her needle into Dvory’s eye.

The scream that issued from Dvory was not in his own voice.

Styke staggered toward Ibana, only for Lindet to rush forward, putting her shoulder beneath his arm and helping him the rest of the way. He got to his knees beside Ibana, leaning on one arm. Lindet took his knife and began tearing away strips of a dead traitor’s jacket for bandages.

Ibana watched her work wordlessly, her eyes eventually traveling to Styke’s face. “The guns have gone quiet,” she muttered.

“So they have,” Styke replied.

“You look like shit.”

“So do you.”

Styke looked down at the dragonman’s bone knife still stuck between her ribs. “I’ll survive. Will you?”

“I …” Ibana tried to shift, her face going white. “I don’t think it hit anything vital. But it hurts like pit. We need a surgeon.”

Lindet paused in her making of bandages. “Get me to the signal towers and I’ll tell my ships that the citadel is ours. You’ll be healed by sorcery by the morning. If you last that long.”

Ibana stared at the side of Lindet’s face. “I didn’t see it before, but now I don’t know why I didn’t. Your sister.” She snorted. “You have a damned lot of explaining to do, Benjamin.”

Styke locked eyes with Lindet. He saw, for just a fraction of a second, Lindet’s desire to make sure no one left this room alive but the two of them. He shook his head. She hesitated, then nodded. “Bandage yourselves. I’ll send the signals.”

Dvory’s screams, in the voice of another, lasted for the rest of the night.

Vlora wiped the gore from her sword, teetering on the edge of consciousness before a quick hit of powder brought her back from the edge. She leapt forward, sword in one hand and knife in the other, carving through a platoon of Dynize soldiers who attempted to hold her at the end of their bayonets. Sorcerous speed allowed her to slip through the gap between their blades, her sword flicking precisely. Her body moved mechanically, without the wherewithal for conscious thought, and she couldn’t have said whether it was seconds or hours between the time she’d turned on that platoon and the time the last man hit the dirt.

Probably seconds. She knew it had been hours since the fight had begun, in the same way a man half-asleep knows when someone is trying to wake him up. Thousands lay dead behind her, littering the road back toward the Crease. Thousands more screamed from their wounds. She forced herself to ignore the savagery of it and press on, looking for the next throat to open with the tip of her sword.

The little part of her mind still able to function wondered where Taniel had gotten to. Most of the carnage along the road belonged to him – he was an impossible force, cutting a swath through the Dynize column with the same unstoppable power as a cannonball skipping across a battlefield. They were both up in the foothills now, killing their way through a second brigade of soldiers, and she’d lost sight of him at some point in what she thought was just the last few minutes.

Someone in the distance yelled to open fire, and bullets whizzed over Vlora’s head or struck the dirt around her. One took a chunk out of her shoulder. She barely noticed it through her powder trance, but she reached out toward the sound of firing muskets and detonated the powder she felt in that direction.

A chorus of screams and a cloud of smoke rose from the ridgetop to her left, and the kickback from detonating all that powder literally knocked her off her feet. Her vision grew dark for a few moments and she wrestled with her mind to keep herself from losing consciousness.

Without even giving her body clear orders, she was back on her feet and sprinting toward a group of horsemen as they charged foolishly toward her down the road, horses leaping the bodies that Taniel had left in his wake. She reached out to detonate their powder, found none, and instead gathered all her sorcerous strength to leap into their midst with sword swinging. One thrust, midleap, cut the jugular of a dragoon. As she came down, she rammed her knife into the thigh of another dragoon, then landed in a crouch, sword swinging up to remove the leg of a horse that slammed into the ground behind her, rolling and crushing its rider.